Despite repeated promises from the people in position to control it, haze is a problem that's not going away. The smoke from the deliberately set fires poses an increasingly serious hazard across the region, yet the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has yet to mount a concerted effort to resolve the issue.

Until last week, all the bloc did was scatter blame, which only undermined chances of cooperation on a huge problem that has a debilitating effect on public health and international transportation. Now at least we have a "road map" for regional cooperation in the coming years, emerging from a ministerial meeting in Kuala Lumpur last week. But unfortunately the meeting's focus was mainly on Indonesia, an unhelpful perspective of a region-wide problem. Indonesia is indeed the primary source of the smoke, but Thailand, Myanmar and Laos also contribute to the haze problem.

The Asean Cooperation towards Transboundary Haze Pollution Control with Means of Implementation - intended as a framework for efforts to end the problem by 2020 - came out of a 12th meeting of environment ministers. That's 12 attempts to resolve an issue that's been of region-wide concern since 1997, one that stems chiefly from private corporations and thousands of farmers burning trees and shrubbery to clear land for planting crops.

The smoke from fires set in Indonesia drifts into Singapore, Malaysia and southern Thailand, sometimes reaching Brunei and the Philippines, shutting airports and highways and sending people to hospital in the scores. In recent years northern Thailand has been similarly engulfed, but in smoke from land-clearing blazes set both locally and in Myanmar.

In 2002 the Asean Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution was signed, the world's first such pact requiring contiguous states to settle a cross-border haze problem and a model for similar agreements elsewhere. At the same time Asean set up a Transboundary Haze Pollution Control Fund with initial seed money of US$500,000 (Bt17.3 million) from each country, most of which did contribute.

So far so good, but the agreement came into effect at the beginning of 2003 and it took another 12 years for all 10 member-nations of Asean to ratify it. Indonesia was the last one to do so, in January last year, for economic and political reasons that are at once understandable and infuriating.

Last week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Natural Resources and Environment Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar declared that he and all of his counterparts across the region had reaffirmed their commitment to preventing haze drift "through concerted national efforts and regional cooperation". The ministers and other officials expressed hope that Indonesia would demonstrate "stronger commitment" this year than it did in the past.

The Indonesians announced the deployment of 3,000 military and police personnel to monitor the situation and said the chiefs of 708 rural villages had been instructed to stop their people clearing land with fire. Meanwhile on Thursday a South Jakarta district court penalised a firm running a sago plantation for triggering fires that spread out of control last year and a massive spread of haze. PT National Sago Prima has to pay a record 1.07 trillion rupiah (Bt2.8 billion) - a 319-billion-rupiah fine and another 753 billion to cover the cost of restoring 3,000 hectares on the Meranti Islands in Riau province.

Coinciding with the Asean environmental summit, the court decision helped underline the Indonesian authorities' commitment to tackling the problem. There were also solid pledges from Singapore and Malaysia, but from the north, no clear statements. This is supposed to be a regional undertaking, but it's obvious that Thailand, Laos and Myanmar have some catching up to do.